The ARM is capable of around 500 BOGOMIPS <ref>http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=78#more-78</ref>, 5400 LINPACK KFLOPS with software floating point and 22000 KFLOPS with softfp hardware floating point<ref>http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=43&mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=266.0</ref>.

The ARM is capable of around 500 BOGOMIPS <ref>http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=78#more-78</ref>, 5400 LINPACK KFLOPS with software floating point and 22000 KFLOPS with softfp hardware floating point<ref>http://www.raspberrypi.org/?page_id=43&mingleforumaction=viewtopic&t=266.0</ref>.

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The gcc compiler flags which will produce the most optimal code for the RPi are probably (can someone check!):

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The gcc compiler flags which will produce the most optimal code for the RPi are:

-marm produces arm code, which is the original 32 bit ARM instruction set, -mthumb produces [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Thumb thumb] code, which is the 16 bit encoded RISC sub-set. Thumb code is smaller but requires more instructions so may be slower.

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-Ofast may produce compile errors for some programs. In this case, -O3 or -O2 should be used instead.

Programming - programming languages that might be used on the Raspberry Pi.

Overview

The Rpi is a fully fledged ARM computer, so it should be able to run about everything compiled for ARM (within system requirements). The boards do not have any on board storage, so everything is on the SD card. If you just want a working system, buy a preformatted SD card from the Foundation, or give PiCard a try, a GUI SD preparation tool made by Liam Frazer.

BootRom

The boards do not include NAND or NOR storage - everything is on the SD card, which has a FAT32 partition with GPU firmware and a kernel image, and an EXT2 partition with the rootfs.

We're not currently using a bootloader - we actually boot via the GPU, which contains a proprietary RISC core (wacky architecture). The GPU mounts the SD card, loads GPU firmware and brings up display/video/3d, loads a kernel image, resets the SD card host and starts the ARM.

You could replace the kernel image with a bootloader image, and that would work fine.

Distributions

Source code and binaries for Raspberry Pi will be available at various places from launch, including pre-built Linux distributions.

Debian is the recommended distribution and pre-loaded SD cards with this distribution will be available shortly after the initial launch through the Raspberry Pi Store.

GPU

The GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24 GFLOPs of general purpose compute and features a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure - the Raspberry Pi team are looking at how they can make this available to application programmers. For the documentation on some Broadcom APIs exposed to control the GPU, see RPi VideoCore APIs.

The GPU blob is an 18MB elf file, including libraries. It does an awful lot. [3]

DSP

There is a DSP, but there isn't currently a public API (Liz thinks the BC team are keen to make one available at some point).